Amazon executives were “okay” with people being signed up for Amazon Prime membership without their knowledge, the Federal Trade Commission said in an amended lawsuit on Wednesday.
The FTC’s original suit, filed in June, alleged Amazon’s manipulation of checkout buttons to trick millions of consumers into enrolling for Prime subscriptions. The Commission added new details to back up its claims on Wednesday, including internal messages and the names of three senior Amazon leaders who allegedly “played a key role”: Neil Lindsay, Russell Grandinetti, and Jamil Ghani.
The amended complaint alleges that Amazon intentionally employed deceptive tactics, making it easy for customers to enroll in Prime unintentionally. According to the FTC, Amazon employees raised concerns about these tactics with company leadership as early as 2016, but no action was taken.
Amazon designers questioned Lindsay about the company’s utilization of dark patterns in its user interface, for example, which purportedly aimed to deceive customers into subscribing to Prime. The lawsuit contends that Lindsay stated Amazon’s approval of these practices, stating that Amazon was “okay” with their use, and that “even if consumers become Prime members unknowingly, they will realize the program’s value and choose to remain members.”
Subscription businesses in the U.S. are facing growing scrutiny from the FTC around their signup cancellation practices. The commission proposed a formal “click to cancel” provision earlier this year that would require companies to offer more straightforward self-service cancellation mechanisms.
User-experience experts say large technology companies have become particularly adept at making it easy to sign up for recurring payments while intentionally making them challenging to cancel, but some publishers and media companies are no strangers to aggressive acquisition and retention practices, often forcing subscribers to call or chat with representatives to disable auto-renewing payments.